Fiet's Vase: And Other Stories of Survival, Europe 1939-1945

The subject of the Holocaust is not a new one for Gold: she was co-author with Miep Gies of Anne Frank Remembered: The Story of the Woman Who Helped Hide the Frank Family. The story of Anne Frank is, in the end, a story of destruction. In her new book, Gold focuses on tales of survival. The vase of the title is the author's reminder of a young woman who didn't survive, of the contingencies on which survival depends.""Not one survivor I've engaged understands why he or she survived and another didn't,"" Gold writes in her affecting introduction. But the tales gathered here illustrated some of the factors they speculate may have played a role:""unusual resolve, family bonds, human kindness, uncanny luck,"" even the supernatural. But Gold writes of the survival not only of individuals, but of our larger sense of humanity: of literature (several items from the destroyed Roman Jewish library), of love (the story of Simon Wiesenthal and his wife), of memory (in a survivor who had sworn never to speak of her wartime experiences). Illus.